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Talitha exploration well results promising
Target depth of 10,452 feet reached with four distinct oil-bearing zones identified; Great Bear Pantheon moves to testing phase
Kay Cashman Petroleum News
Pantheon Resources plc said Feb. 15 that the Great Bear Pantheon-operated Talitha A exploration well has reached its target depth of 10,452 feet and the results so far seem promising. The central North Slope well has been logged and sidewall cores taken for assaying by a third party lab.
“Based on preliminary analysis, the well has penetrated all objective formations and encountered oil in each of them,” Pantheon said in a press release.
“Four distinct oil-bearing zones have been identified,” the AIM-listed, London-based company said. “The current plan is to test the Shelf Margin Deltaic, Basin Floor Fan (two separate zones) and the Kuparuk zones. Testing all zones is critical to determine ultimate commerciality.”
Pantheon said it has a 100% working interest in Talitha A, which is some 8 miles west of Dalton Highway Milepost 386.7 on state lease ADL 391658 in the newly formed 44,463-acre Talitha unit.
Drilling is being done by Calista Rig 3 (see photo in pdf and print versions of this story).
So far so good “We are very encouraged with operations to date; it’s definitely a case of ‘so far, so good’! We have penetrated all our objective formations and encountered oil in each of them - this is a great result so far. Drilling has gone smoothly, and we have a borehole in good condition which has allowed us to obtain valuable, high quality data to formulate a testing program in all our zones of interest,” Bob Rosenthal, technical director for the drilling program, said.
“Preliminary analysis suggests that the well has multiple horizons with potential to be commercial but is not yet proven and we remain cautiously optimistic. The Talitha A location was selected to test the primary SMD zone in the optimal location whilst penetrating as many of the other secondary targets, acknowledging their respective suboptimal locations, and to test whether they were oil bearing,” he said.
“Successfully recovering oil to surface from these zones will be important in moving prospective resources (i.e. exploration) to contingent resources (i.e. discovered) and confirming the potential commerciality of major oil accumulations within the Talitha structure,” Rosenthal added. “The discovery of significant quantities of oil in this location would have very important ramifications for future exploration in the area. Talitha is close to the trans-Alaska pipeline and Dalton Highway which significantly enhances the economic value of any discovered oil.”
Pantheon CEO Jay Cheatham, called Talitha A a potential company maker: “Although the reservoir quality of the SMD did not improve from the PS#1 as we had hoped, it still has the potential to be a very good result. We’ll test it and make a more detailed assessment at that point. We were pleasantly surprised in the Basin Floor Fan and Kuparuk formations.”
He noted the Kuparuk formation is a major regional legacy producer.
“We’ve often said that any one of the four zones at Talitha could be company makers, and we have three contenders in the SMD, Basin Floor Fan and Kuparuk, all of which show great promise. As always, we must wait until testing is completed before we can make any definitive assessments, but at this time I would say Talitha A has met or exceeded our expectations thus far,” Cheatham said.
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